Since about 2000, there has been a "house computer" at 5 Fran
Court, controlling various home mechanisms automatically. These
mechanisms are largely confined to watering and heating systems,
but other functionalities have been, are, or will be operational
as well.

dimboolacron jobsEvery 5 minutes a dimboola cron job under account
ajh runs the program
/Users/ajh/bin/updatePlots.sh, which in turn runs the
jobs:
updateTempPlot.shupdateTankPlot.shupdateSolarPlot.sh
See below for further details on these jobs.
temperatureThe log of house temperatures is maintained in a file
/circuit-dir/temp.log kept on central.
A cron job runs the program
/Users/ajh/bin/updateTempPlot.sh, which
rsyncs the temp.log file to
dimboola, and then
runs
/Users/ajh/Personal/Home/Heating/tempplot.py, which
creates a new tempplot.png file, which is
(re)linked to the web file
/Users/ajh/Sites/personal/tempplot.png
This latter file is accessed and displayed by various web pages.
centralwater tank levelEvery day at midnight, a cron job on central
under account ajh runs the program
/home/ajh/bin/woo2plasFill.py 10, which turns on the
wootank to plastank valve for 10 minutes (the parameter
10). Currently this is disabled (commented
out). Revision: it has been re-enabled, with a slightly
different cron job schedule.garedelyon

garedelyon is a low-power microcomputer running Linux.
It is intended to take over the operations of central,
since it is low power and noiseless. However, restrictions on
hardware have seen this migration process stall somewhat, and it
needs a concerted effort to restart the migration. To date,
only weather station data and water tank logging have been migrated.

weather stationThis function reads the TRS80 WX200 weather station device
on demand. It is accessible by running the program
/usr/bin/wx200py, which can also be called
remotely.water loggingThe water logging relies upon an RS232 port,
/dev/ttyUSB0, which must be initialised with XON/XOFF
flow control. (See the script /ttydumper.sh). This is
locally developed circuit uses a capacitance bridge that is
sensitive to the water level, and transmits every minute a new
reading. The reading must be calibrated to give water level
in appropriate units, and this is done by some user level
software. Data is logged to the file /water.logRestarting

If for any reason garedelyon must be restarted, you
will need to restart the weather daemon
(/usr/sbin/wx200d), as well as the water logging
subsystem. This latter has a script /ttydumper.sh to
shut down and restart the water logging in an orderly way.